The Cowl - v. 75 - n. 1 - Sept 9, 2010

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 75 - Number 1 - September 9, 2010. 20 pages

Achieving Immersive Gameplay: Interpreters and Video Game Accessibility

ASL/English interpreters (ASLEI) are exploring their influence and how they impact the communities they work with. Sensitive to oppression and marginalization of the needs of the d/Deaf community, interpreters and interpreting students are looking at how they can best support greater accessibility for people with who identify as d/Deaf or hard of hearing. Video games are one such area where accessibility is lacking. Problems include reliance on sound cues for crucial survival information..

Spectrum, Volume 41, Issue 5

Highlights include: New Linda’s Containers: Saving the Planet or Inconvenient New Initiative? --The School of Communication and Media Arts has announced the annual Student Photography Exhibition, featuring junior Erica Condon and senior Erica Torrens, and presented by Professor Richard Falco (photos) --This fall season marks the 25th anniversary of the Sacred Heart University Marching Band --New Skull Session format allows fans to watch the band play and the color guard spin their whole field show on the new amphitheater steps. “We will also play school songs, patriotic selections, our field show with dances, and we even feature our new bagpipers,” said Keith Johnston, Director of Bands --Theatre Arts Program honored as one of the top 25 Bachelor programs of 2018-2019 --The SHU football team had their first conference match up of the season on Sept. 22, by defeating Wagner College 41-14, in Staten Island, N.Y. --Cheerleading team is ready for the fall season (photo) --Alumnus Alex Faccenda hired as new head coach of the club baseball team --Sports scoreboard

Uncommon Places: The Multimodal Art of Embodied Invention

This dissertation develops the concept of embodied invention, an epistemology and design philosophy that treats multimodal media—such as comics and videogames—as heuristics for translating knowledges between bodies, communities, and cultures. In classical rhetoric invention refers to the art of discovering knowledge through the commonplaces—those opinions, beliefs, and values common to a particular time and place. Rhetors would train themselves in invention by studying commonplace books—texts that contained common expressions, phrases, and allegories of a particular community, region, or culture. Drawing on phenomenology, semiotics, and media theory, this dissertation puts forward an embodied account of invention, one that correlates knowledge of the world with one’s position or place in the world. The commonplaces, then, are as much bodily and sensory as they are social and cultural, and as such the notion of commonplace books needs to be expanded to include media that capture not just the common expressions and phrases of a particular time and place but the common sensations and sensory experiences of particular bodies and cultures. This novel understanding of invention sheds light on conceptions of embodiment, normalcy, and knowledge translation. Feminist and disability studies scholarship exemplifies how some places are—culturally, socially, and phenomenologically—more common than others, and that commonality (or lack thereof) facilitates or inhibits the movement of knowledge. Multimodal media afford people marginalized by what is held to be common or normal—such as women, LGBTQ persons, persons of colour, and persons with disabilities—with the means to convey the sensory and semiotic situation in which their knowledges are situated. Graphic autobiographies and memoirs—such as Cece Bell’s El Deafo and Paul Karasik and Judy Karasik’s The Ride Together: A Brother and Sister's Memoir of Autism in the Family—and (semi-)autobiographical videogames—such as Mainichi and The Oldest Game—can be seen to represent both the sensory and socio-cultural commonplaces of their authors, fostering a form of invention that is capable of translating knowledges embedded within sensory, social, and cultural situations. In order to make this point effectively, and to demonstrate its applicability to design, a portion of this dissertation is argued through an accompanying videogame called Allergies & Allegories

Mustang Daily, October 12, 1994

Student newspaper of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA.https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/studentnewspaper/5758/thumbnail.jp

Agential Fantasy: A Copenhagen Approach to the Tabletop Role-Playing Game

In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published the world’s first commercial role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. The tabletop roleplaying game provoked a new form of textual engagement: it entangled the fantastic tales of early 20th Century pulp fiction with the practice of play. The tabletop role-playing game initiated new perspectives on how classic texts could not only be read but also played. Our contemporary world is becoming increasingly gamified: digital media applications (from mobile phones to the personal home computer) have embedded game elements, structures, processes, and lexicons in our modern lives. Tabletop role-playing was a herald for, and catalyst, of this contemporary phenomenon. Espen Aarseth notes that tabletop role-playing games can be considered as an early from of the “cybertext,” a text that requires “non-trivial” effort for its engagement, and is “the oral predecessor to computerized, written, adventure games.”The project of this dissertation offers an approach of examining and understanding the practice of tabletop role-playing through Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism. Agential realism is based on concepts of Niels Bohr’s “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum phenomenon and its premise that nothing can be observed without changing what is observed. Agential realism requires us to accept and acknowledge our complicity in the creation, physical and sociocultural, of the realities which surround, bound, and interpellate us. This dissertation complicates the notion of singular authorship of isolated texts and realities by examining all the relationships necessary to produce a tabletop roleplaying game text. The first chapter of this dissertation introduces the concepts of agential realism while the second offers the historical context for the emergence of tabletop role-playing games. The third chapter analyzes the affective and aesthetic inspirations for Dungeons & Dragons to consider the conditions for the emergence of the first commercial tabletop role-playing game and how it would reconfigure the pulp and classic mythologies that inspired it. In the fourth chapter, I examine the rules for Traveller, an early science fiction tabletop role-playing game directly inspired by the practice of Dungeons & Dragons play, to consider how the procedural mechanics of games impact their authorship. The fifth chapter analyzes another mode of authorship for the role-playing game by analyzing its actual play; in this chapter, I examine specific game sessions from a campaign of the tabletop role-playing game, Call of Cthulhu. Throughout these chapters, we understand how the tabletop role-playing game text, like our physical and sociocultural realities, exist within states of radical possibility. Each mode of authorship, through a text’s inspiration, mechanical construction, and subjective interpretation are observations that fix the tabletop role-playing text into a specific manifestation – thought it may exist within any a priori of an observation. This dissertation advocates for an approach to consider realities, within and beyond the games we play, not as isolated moments of objective experience, but as the inevitable consequences of entanglements with all the authors (and players) that share them

Uncommon Places: The Multimodal Art of Embodied Invention

This dissertation develops the concept of embodied invention, an epistemology and design philosophy that treats multimodal media—such as comics and videogames—as heuristics for translating knowledges between bodies, communities, and cultures. In classical rhetoric invention refers to the art of discovering knowledge through the commonplaces—those opinions, beliefs, and values common to a particular time and place. Rhetors would train themselves in invention by studying commonplace books—texts that contained common expressions, phrases, and allegories of a particular community, region, or culture. Drawing on phenomenology, semiotics, and media theory, this dissertation puts forward an embodied account of invention, one that correlates knowledge of the world with one’s position or place in the world. The commonplaces, then, are as much bodily and sensory as they are social and cultural, and as such the notion of commonplace books needs to be expanded to include media that capture not just the common expressions and phrases of a particular time and place but the common sensations and sensory experiences of particular bodies and cultures. This novel understanding of invention sheds light on conceptions of embodiment, normalcy, and knowledge translation. Feminist and disability studies scholarship exemplifies how some places are—culturally, socially, and phenomenologically—more common than others, and that commonality (or lack thereof) facilitates or inhibits the movement of knowledge. Multimodal media afford people marginalized by what is held to be common or normal—such as women, LGBTQ persons, persons of colour, and persons with disabilities—with the means to convey the sensory and semiotic situation in which their knowledges are situated. Graphic autobiographies and memoirs—such as Cece Bell’s El Deafo and Paul Karasik and Judy Karasik’s The Ride Together: A Brother and Sister's Memoir of Autism in the Family—and (semi-)autobiographical videogames—such as Mainichi and The Oldest Game—can be seen to represent both the sensory and socio-cultural commonplaces of their authors, fostering a form of invention that is capable of translating knowledges embedded within sensory, social, and cultural situations. In order to make this point effectively, and to demonstrate its applicability to design, a portion of this dissertation is argued through an accompanying videogame called Allergies & Allegories